known what was happening, that we were growing ever farther apart, that my heart was breaking and I had too much pride to say it to her.
“Please, Gabrielle, I cannot endure the loneliness! Stay with me.” By the time we left Italy I was playing dangerous little games with mortals. I’d see a man, or a woman—a human being who looked perfect to me spiritually—and I would follow the human about. Maybe for a week I’d do this, then a month, sometimes even longer than that. I’d fall in love with the being. I’d imagine friendship, conversation, intimacy that we could never have. In some magical and imaginary moment I would say: “But you see what I am,” and this human being, in supreme spiritual understanding, would say: “Yes, I see. I understand.”
Nonsense, really. Very like the fairy tale where the princess gives her selfless love to the prince who is enchanted and he is himself again and the monster no more. Only in this dark fairy tale I would pass right into my mortal lover. We would become one being, and I would be flesh and blood again.
Lovely idea, that. Only I began to think more and more of Armand’s warnings, that I’d work the Dark Trick again for the same reasons I’d done it before. And I stopped playing the game altogether. I merely went hunting with all the old vengeance and cruelty, and it wasn’t merely the evildoer I brought down.
IN THE city of Athens I wrote the following message to Marius:
“I do not know why I go on. I do not search for truth. I do not believe in it. I hope for no ancient secrets from you, whatever they may be. But I believe in something. Maybe simply in the beauty of the world through which I wander or in the will to live itself. This gift was given to me too early. It was given for no good reason. And already at the age of thirty mortal years, I have some understanding as to why so many of our kind have wasted it, given it up. Yet I continue. And I search for you.”
How long I could have wandered through Europe and Asia in this fashion I do not know. For all my complaints about loneliness, I was used to it all. And there were new cities as there were new victims, new languages, and new music to hear. No matter what my pain, I fixed my mind on a new destination. I wanted to know all the cities of the earth, finally, even the far-off capitals of India and China, where the simplest objects would seem alien and the minds I pierced as strange as those of creatures from another world.
But as we went south from Istanbul into Asia Minor, Gabrielle felt the allure of the new and strange land even more strongly, so that she was scarcely ever at my side.
And things were reaching a horrid climax in France, not merely with the mortal world I still grieved for, but with the vampires of the theater as well.
3
BEFORE I ever left Greece, I’d been hearing disturbing news from English and French travelers of the troubles at home. And when I reached the European hostelry in Ankara there was a large packet of letters waiting for me.
Roget had moved all of my money out of France, and into foreign banks. “You must not consider returning to Paris,” he wrote. “I have advised your father and your brothers to keep out of all controversy. It is not the climate for monarchists here.”
Eleni’s letters spoke in their own way of the same things:
Audiences want to see the aristocracy made fools of. Our little play featuring a clumsy queen puppet, who is trampled mercilessly by the mindless troop of puppet soldiers whom she seeks to command, draws loud laughter and screams.
The clergy is also ripe for derision: In another little drama we have a bumptious priest come to chastise a group of dancing-girl marionettes for their indecent conduct. But alas, their dancing master, who is in fact a red-horned devil, turns the unfortunate cleric into a werewolf who ends his days kept by the laughing girls in a golden cage.
All this is the genius of Our Divine Violinist, but we must now be with him every waking moment. To force him to write we tie him to the chair. We put ink and paper in front of him. And if this fails, we make him dictate